Dimitris Glezos, Managing Director of the company Transifex, a few days ago announced a $ 2,5 $ million dollar funding agreement from leading international investors, turned into a small revolution in the digital revolution.
As a student at the Department of Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic School of the University of Patras, he made the department's website while working as a developer in the private sector. He then started a Ph.D. at the University of Manchester to apply fuzzy logic to artificial intelligence systems.
At the same time, he was active in the free software community and especially in the operating system Fedora. "At that time it had about 10 million users, 1.000 translators and about 300 programmers - almost all volunteers," Mr. Glezos tells "K". “The collaboration between translators and programmers was particularly problematic. Some didn't want to mess with technical issues, while others couldn't manage anything related to the language."
This is how Transifex was born, an innovative software that greatly facilitates this laborious process and was enthusiastically embraced by the free software classes. 2009, Mr. Glezos, participated in the Summer of Code program of Google, where he further developed the idea, abandoned his Ph.D. and founded his company (the original name of which was Indifex) in Patras.
"Among our first clients were Intel and Nokia", says the young businessman - only 32 years old today -. "There was a lot of demand for what we offered." Today, five years later, the company has moved from Patras to Athens and opened an office in Silicon Valley – from where Mr. Glezos spoke to us. It has customers from more than 30 countries, its services are used in 17.000 enterprises with 170.000 users. But what exactly do these services consist of?
To learn, "K" went to Transifex headquarters in New Heraklion, the company's headquarters for research and development. Her office, with the Breaking Bad poster and books like Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point on the shelves, is in a single space with Persado's offices, another promising Greek start-up. "They gave us the privilege, because they did not use it and they liked the idea of the climate that would be created. It has worked great, "says Mr. Glezos. It is yet another example of the co-operation that exists among the newest online businesses in Greece - in direct contrast to the mutual suspicion and unfair competition that characterize most other industries.
Antonis Garneles, head of product development, explains our miraculous properties. According to the company's website, Transifex has evolved from a translation tool for the world of open source software to a global platform for the "localization" of software products. What does this mean; "It makes the translation process much more efficient and significantly reduces the cost to the customer," explains Mr. Garnelis. "For example, we have introduced an algorithm, called translation memory, which stores all the translations that have been made. Thus, when a new translation is needed, which is largely similar to an older one, the algorithm identifies the similarity and suggests that the translator use it instead of doing the job again from the beginning. "
By word of mouth
The $2,5 million in seed funding Transifex secured was the first in its short history. Until now, it had grown solely by word of mouth, between developers and the free software community. The main investor is New Enterprise Associates, ένα αμερικανικό venture capital fund με 13 δισ. δολ. επενδεδυμένα ανά τον κόσμο. Στη χρηματοδότηση συμμετείχαν επίσης angel investors, μεταξύ των οποίων ο βετεράνος της Σίλικον Βάλεϊ Θάνος Τριάντ και ο Γιώργος Παπαδόπουλος, ιδρυτής της εταιρείας Atypon. Τα χρήματα θα χρησιμοποιηθούν για την ανάπτυξη του Transifex Live, της νέας υπηρεσίας της εταιρείας, που μεταφράζει αυτόματα content with the entrytreatment μιας μόνο γραμμής code on a website.
Source: kathimerini.gr
